Related papers: Bounding Evidence and Estimating Log-Likelihood in…

Recent work in unsupervised representation learning has focused on learning deep directed latent-variable models. Fitting these models by maximizing the marginal likelihood or evidence is typically intractable, thus a common approximation…

While Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) achieve remarkable performance, their tendency to produce overconfident predictions. Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) mitigates this by formulating predictions as a Dirichlet distribution over class…

In this paper, we develop the notion of evidence lower bound difference (ELBD), based on which an efficient score algorithm is presented to implement feature selection on latent variables of VAE and its variants. Further, we propose weak…

We prove that the evidence lower bound (ELBO) employed by variational auto-encoders (VAEs) admits non-trivial solutions having constant posterior variances under certain mild conditions, removing the need to learn variances in the encoder.…

Stochastic variational inference (SVI) plays a key role in Bayesian deep learning. Recently various divergences have been proposed to design the surrogate loss for variational inference. We present a simple upper bound of the evidence as…

The Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) is a quantity that plays a key role in variational inference. It can also be used as a criterion in model selection. However, though extremely popular in practice in the variational Bayes community, there has…

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are a standard framework for inducing latent variable models that have been shown effective in learning text representations as well as in text generation. The key challenge with using VAEs is the {\it…

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are a popular framework for modeling complex data distributions; they can be efficiently trained via variational inference by maximizing the evidence lower bound (ELBO), at the expense of a gap to the exact…

Recent methods for knowledge grounded dialogs generate responses by incorporating information from an external textual document. These methods do not require the exact document to be known during training and rely on the use of a retrieval…

When trained effectively, the Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is both a powerful language model and an effective representation learning framework. In practice, however, VAEs are trained with the evidence lower bound (ELBO) as a surrogate…

Log-likelihood is a standard metric for evaluating generative models. Unfortunately, in contrast to autoregressive models (ARMs), discrete diffusion models generally do not admit exact computation of this quantity. Existing evaluations,…

Decomposition of the evidence lower bound (ELBO) objective of VAE used for density estimation revealed the deficiency of VAE for representation learning and suggested ways to improve the model. In this paper, we investigate whether we can…

A framework to boost the efficiency of Bayesian inference in probabilistic programs is introduced by embedding a sampler inside a variational posterior approximation. We call it the refined variational approximation. Its strength lies both…

Recent work in adversarial attacks has developed provably robust methods for training deep neural network classifiers. However, although they are often mentioned in the context of robustness, deep generative models themselves have received…

The variational autoencoder (VAE) is a popular combination of deep latent variable model and accompanying variational learning technique. By using a neural inference network to approximate the model's posterior on latent variables, VAEs…

We provide theoretical and empirical evidence that using tighter evidence lower bounds (ELBOs) can be detrimental to the process of learning an inference network by reducing the signal-to-noise ratio of the gradient estimator. Our results…

A trade-off exists between reconstruction quality and the prior regularisation in the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) loss that Variational Autoencoder (VAE) models use for learning. There are few satisfactory approaches to deal with a balance…

We consider a variational autoencoder (VAE) for binary data. Our main innovations are an interpretable lower bound for its training objective, a modified initialization and architecture of such a VAE that leads to faster training, and a…

In this paper we propose two novel bounds for the log-likelihood based on Kullback-Leibler and the R\'{e}nyi divergences, which can be used for variational inference and in particular for the training of Variational AutoEncoders. Our…

Multimodal learning with variational autoencoders (VAEs) requires estimating joint distributions to evaluate the evidence lower bound (ELBO). Current methods, the product and mixture of experts, aggregate single-modality distributions…